Charles Cooke of National Review Online minces no words as he discusses people defending Hamas’ actions during its attack on Israel.
As is increasingly common in our remorselessly overcomplicated age, the coverage of Hamas’s extraordinarily brutal incursion into the nation of Israel has been sliced and diced along a whole host of convoluted lines. When describing the various players, commentators have set them against a series of ideological axes: Left and Right, Zionist and anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, the Settlers and the Displaced, and so forth. If I may be so bold, I would like to propose that these categories are wholly inadequate to the task before us and that, instead, we ought to be dividing the observers into just two camps. Into the first, we can place the normal human beings. Into the second, we can place the unreconstructed crackpots who have lost their godforsaken minds.
It is simply not within the normal bounds of human behavior to look at what has happened in Israel and to filter one’s instinctive moral reaction through whatever goofy, specious, ugly ideology one might have picked up in an overpriced seminar hall when aged 19. In their proper place, terms such as “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and “occupation” can be descriptively useful; as a response to the news that a bunch of armed savages have just massacred a thousand innocent people in cold blood, they are utterly, disastrously, spectacularly irrelevant. I daresay that, in certain faculty lounges and newsrooms, the latest iteration of the Unified Oppressed/Oppressor Matrix goes down a treat. To everyone else, it appears psychotic. Well-adjusted people do not read about surprise attacks that involve the machine-gunning of concertgoers, the live-streaming of executions, the beheading of babies, the raping and desecration of women, and the immolation of corpses and respond by musing about how intersectional the dead might have been.
